Dear Action Fans,
For us, the action is the juice. And this video is JUICY!
Maybe we’re high on all the gunfire and roundhouse kicks, but this feels like the best video yet in our Greatest Movies A-Z series with WatchMojo. Every movie just rocks. But enough talk, time for action!
Again, we gave ourselves some guidelines:
- One film per letter
- Articles don’t count (the, an, a, etc.)
- Final list should encapsulate the genre
The last rule dictated a lot of our hardest decisions. It also made for some heated debates, which only barely avoided becoming all-out fights.
(Don’t worry. Cooler heads prevailed. Even if that goes against the spirit of the genre.)
So here’s some take-aways from our decision-making process. For the first time ever we included some of these in the video itself. But here’s some more detail:
LESSONS FROM ACTION A-Z
TOP DECADE: 2000s
The Bourne trilogy, Daniel Craig’s James Bond, Ip Man… fucking IP MAN! It was a good decade for sure, but Q, V, and X also won with virtually no competition. The most impressive decade was the 80s thanks to Hong Kong. And the 90s were shockingly under-represented.
HARDEST LETTER: F
Holy F! Not only are there a lot of options for this letter, with the entire Fast & Furious franchise, but you’ve got a great variety of options: from classic action-thrillers like The French Connection and The Fugitive, to beloved shoot-em-ups like Face/Off and First Blood, to one one of the best Bond movies - From Russia With Love. But in the end, peak Fast and Furious - Fast 5 - won this quarter mile.
CHEATED OUT: Mission: Impossible - all of them
What a crime that all six Mission: Impossible movies were up against Mad Mad Fury Road. Picking one M:I film would have been its own major challenge (probably the original or Ghost Protocol, right?), but I guess we were spared that agony. Still, it feels like the franchise got cheated.
BEST BATTLE: Eastern Condors vs Enter the Dragon
If you think Bruce Lee should be on this list, go rewatch those movies and put the action up against any of his Hong Kong contemporaries. Hell, just watch the fight with Sammo Hung in Enter the Dragon and then ANY action scene with Sammo Hung in Eastern Condors to prove the point. More proof that a little body fat is actually a good thing.
SPECIAL CONSIDERATION: North by Northwest
When you search “action” movies on Wikipedia, they don’t even bother listing anything before the 1960s. But North by Northwest is a type of proto-action movie that helped define what the genre would become. Also, how fun is the transition we did from Fury Road into this film? Come on!
Think your list would be better? More balanced? Less heart-breaking? Let us know.
Sincerely,
Dear Cast & Crew
